sport

Ted Whitten was from my limited perception of the man, a ridgy didge good footballer, who played passionately for club and state. It is great that lots of money is being raised for charities from this annual match. The AFL upped the ante on the publicising of this football game by legislating a bye for all finalists a week before the finals. The intense focus of the media’s glare on this ‘bit of fun’ has turned a non-entity into something front of house. It has come up very short of the mark.

There were two token newby female AFL players in the match, one, conveniently on each team. Abbie Holmes was listed to play well ahead of the match, but a certain Nobel lady for the Vics starred as well; and must have come in late. These very attractive, fit looking, women, who we are told, will be playing in the inaugural Women’s AFL National Competition next year. People, who like watching athletic looking women playing the Australian game are anticipating the start of this scheduled 2017 competition. Seeing predominantly overweight old blokes running around in a bit of hit and giggle is one thing. Having them hand off, repetitiously, chances for these two girls in front of goals, as if they were (apologies to the wonderful disabled Olympians) disabled, was demeaning to women athletes everywhere.

Imagine, if these ex-champion footballers were, in their hail fellow well-met spirit, giving off lollypop handballs to disabled AFL footballers in wheelchairs in front of goal, or exactly, just two of these token, unfortunates, for the benefit of the TV cameras. How would the enlightened world view the patronising behaviour of these broken down ex-gladiators of the game? Big Brian Taylor, so lacking in courage he stays safely behind the commentator’s microphone, has a big mouth when it comes to criticising those that play. He, to be fair to him, does not sound like a supporter of the concept itself, but what he does is carp at the efforts of those who give it their all.

Perhaps, it is hard for these old warriors to understand that their time in the sun is over and that the game has come to inspire new people. AFL is a mighty game; and it has been the provenance of white Anglo-Saxon males for many years. Now, it is time for the girls to play, time for new Australians to play, time for the long beleaguered Aboriginal players to take their place as the naturally talented champions of the game. Football is no longer the exclusive realm of alpha males, who made the team in decade’s past, it is now a game for all, men, women, gays, minorities and more.

Let’s also lose the bullshit, “I am not trying”, clowning around, supposed compulsory attitude toward playing in this entertaining game. If you pull on the jumper, man up, and play the game, stop denigrating those that can still play. The fans appreciate a game, not a monstrosity. There is nothing wrong with being a fat bastard, as long as you run your fat guts out trying to get the ball. Don’t belittle the women who are willing to give their all, just because your time is done. Don’t listen to the big mouths who want to make all other forms of football inept and permanently amateur. They are poor examples of some comedic Bob Hope idea gone obsolete. Brian Taylor you are less than a joke.

Attitudes of dumb footballers must be consigned to the dumpster; and the visionary leaders of this game must continue to take the greatest game of all beyond the confines of the merely physically talented.

Offering up food, chainsaws, a place to charge up, and even hunting down suspected thieves: the community spirit springs into action as Top Enders rally together to help friends and strangers alike in the wake of Cyclone Marcus.

While the Reserve Bank of Australia might not be able to influence the current cash rate, it can still influence longer-term rates by offering guidance about its future policy decisions, write Efrem Castelnuovo, Bruce Preston and Giovanni Pellegrino.

In his first detailed comments on the matter, Vladimir Putin says it is nonsense to think that Moscow would have poisoned former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, and insists Russia doesn't have the kind of nerve agent used to in the attack.

THE line separating the improbable from the impossible is hard to pin down. The annual single-elimination tournament to crown the champion of North America’s National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in men’s basketball is known as “March Madness”, thanks to the steady diet of upsets it produces. Every year, a few ragtag gangs of fresh-faced students […]

THE release of a new Keith Jarrett album is not usually a significant event in the world of jazz. Over a career that has spanned some 50 years, Mr Jarrett has released dozens of albums, either as a sideman (with Miles Davis or Jan Garbarek), his trio (with Gary Peacock on bass and Jack DeJohnette […]

THE odd politics and fraught economics of recent years have inspired all sorts of thoughtful works for the stage. Yet many of these, such as Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer-prizewinning “Sweat”, about struggling factory workers in Reading, Pennsylvania, and Sarah Burgess’s “Kings”, which probes the sleazy machinations of political lobbyists in Washington (at New York’s Public Theatre […]

“RED SPARROW”, a new thriller featuring Jennifer Lawrence as a Russian spy, is not entirely a paint-by-numbers film. Its hero is a woman. A few of its twists are genuinely surprising. But in one way, it is Hollywood to the core. Its Russian characters display their Russianness by speaking accented English to each other. Ms […]

The Devils’ Dance. By Hamid Ismailov. Translated by Donald Rayfield. Tilted Axis Press; 200 pages; £9.99.FROM Siberian banishment to the Soviet gulag, the cruelty of punishments under Russia’s tyrants has yielded a commensurately rich literature. It is unlikely, though, that any previous story has likened interrogation by Stalin’s secret police to a game of cricket, […]

Songs they will sing for a thousand yearsSomething Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution. By Todd Purdum. Henry Holt; 400 pages; $32. To be published in Britain in May; £25.AT THE age of 46 Oscar Hammerstein was living as a country squire on his Pennsylvania farm, apparently washed up. It was 14 years since he […]